The Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Answer

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The Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Answer Diversify your product line. Stick to your knitting. Hire a professional manager. Watch fixed costs. Those are some of the suggestions that entrepreneurs sort through as they try to get their ventures off the ground. Why all the conflicting advice? Because in a young company, all decisions are up for grabs. Continued here

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Genpact CEO Tiger Tyagarajan: AI Is Getting Good, But Still Can't Replace Human Curiosity HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius sat down with Tiger Tyagarajan, CEO of Genpact. As CEO of a $4 billion global firm that advises clients on digital transformation, Tiger had a lot to say about AI, the metaverse, and how companies often fail on their innovation journey. “When it comes to digital transformation, it’s not just about technology,” he said. “It’s about processes, about the data underlying those processes; it’s about people.” Tiger also had interesting things to say about his biggest passion: cricket. (He schedules his board meetings so that they won’t clash with the Indian cricket team’s matches.) Continued here

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Yes, Mr. President, There Is Some There There Biden’s team should have been more transparent about his classified documents. But the strategy could still work for him in the end. Crisis communications, at its core, is pretty simple: Discern where the story is going. Fully disclose the facts. Admit where mistakes were made. And do it all as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Continued here

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The Best Webcams for Looking Brighter and Better If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED I screen, you screen, we all scream because of screen time. Videoconferencing is here to stay, from job interviews to company meetings to therapy appointments. It was seemingly inevitable, just as The Jetsons predicted, only sped up because we spent the past few years holed up indoors, reenacting a NASA isolation experiment. Even though newer MacBooks' built-in webcams now have 1080p resolution, you'll make a better onscreen impression if you upgrade to a standalone webcam. Continued here

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What Secrets Lie Beneath This 17th-Century French Aristocrat's Smile? New research suggests noblewoman Anne d'Alégre used gold wire to keep her decaying teeth in place Long before early 20th-century doctors began using metal braces to straighten their patients' teeth, a French aristocrat named Anne d'Alègre devised a novel way of keeping her smile intact. As archaeologists discovered while studying the 17th-century noblewoman's skull, she used gold wire to hold her decaying teeth—as well as an ivory prosthesis—in place. Continued here

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To Make Lasting Progress on DEI, Measure Outcomes Organizations that have committed to making progress on DEI goals know the importance of metrics and KPIs, but even the most committed to tracking metrics often struggle to identify the right ones. While tracking demographic data is important, there are a variety of other metrics organizations can focus on that shed light on DEI outcomes (disambiguated by demographic). To ensure that organizations make tangible and lasting progress on DEI goals, the author recommends three actions to take with regards to tracking metrics. First, recognize the importance of outcome metrics beyond demographics. Next, for each category that you choose to measure, develop a theory of change to identify tailored proxy metrics. Finally, to ensure that these findings result in lasting outcomes, create a plan in advance for using that data to follow up and take action. Continued here

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Memphis’s Policing Strategy Was Bound to Result in Tragedy The officers charged in Tyre Nichols’s death were all members of the SCORPION team, which poured law-enforcement resources into the most violent parts of the city. Like many American cities, Memphis, Tennessee, has a long history of vexed relationships between the police and Black citizens. Also like many cities, it has seen an increase in activism for police reform in recent years. But over the past two years, as I reported on policing in Memphis, I heard laments from activists that they struggled to bring the attention of elected officials and a broad swath of citizens to the problems they saw. Continued here

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The Five Stages of Small Business Growth Categorizing the problems and growth patterns of small businesses in a systematic way that is useful to entrepreneurs seems at first glance a hopeless task. Small businesses vary widely in size and capacity for growth. They are characterized by independence of action, differing organizational structures, and varied management styles. Continued here

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This Shape-Shifting Robot Can Liquefy Itself and Reform The technology could one day assemble and repair hard-to-reach circuits, act as a universal screw or retrieve foreign objects from a body, researchers say Researchers have created a miniature robot that can melt and reform back into its original shape, allowing it to complete tasks in tight spaces or even escape from behind bars. The team tested its mobility and shape-morphing abilities and published their results Wednesday in the journal Matter. Continued here

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Death By a Thousand Personality Quizzes One might assume that when your boss finally comes to tell you that the robots are here to do your job, he won’t also point out with enthusiasm that they’re going to do it 10 times better than you did. Alas, this was not the case at BuzzFeed. Yesterday, at a virtual all-hands meeting, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti had some news to discuss about the automated future of media. The brand, known for massively viral stories aggregated from social media and being the most notable progenitor of what some might call clickbait, would begin publishing content generated by artificial-intelligence programs. In other words: Robots would help make BuzzFeed posts. Continued here

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How Mission-Driven Companies Are Preparing for a Recession When downturns strike, corporate diversity and sustainability initiatives can become victims of cost-cutting. Here's how founders in those sectors are responding. Continued here

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Managers and Leaders: Are They Different? Managers and leaders are two very different types of people. Managers’ goals arise out of necessities rather than desires; they excel at defusing conflicts between individuals or departments, placating all sides while ensuring that an organization’s day-to-day business gets done. Leaders, on the other hand, adopt personal, active attitudes toward goals. They look for the opportunities and rewards that lie around the corner, inspiring subordinates and firing up the creative process with their own energy. Their relationships with employees and coworkers are intense, and their working environment is often chaotic. Continued here

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SPACs: What You Need to Know Special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, have been around in various forms for decades, but during the past two years they’ve taken off in the United States. In 2019, 59 were created, with $13 billion invested; in 2020, 247 were created, with $80 billion invested; and in the first quarter of 2021 alone, 295 were created, with $96 billion invested. In 2020, SPACs accounted for more than 50% of new publicly listed U.S. companies. Continued here

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Why is the Modi documentary so hard to find? Some blame lies with the BBC For just over a week, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has demanded online platforms remove links to a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which explores his role in communal violence in Gujarat in 2002. The takedowns have been an alarming demonstration of the powers of the country’s recent IT law, which grants new powers to suppress content that “threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India.” But not all the takedowns of the documentary are related to the Indian government’s request. The BBC has issued its own series of takedowns on copyright grounds, which have gone largely unreported. To outside observers, those takedowns may have appeared to be the result of pressure from the Indian government. Continued here

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The Overlooked Key to a Successful Scale-Up This stage isn’t part of traditional organizational theory, which holds that businesses begin in exploration mode (testing out hypotheses about how they’ll solve problems and learning whether people will pay for their solutions) and then move into exploitation mode (as growth slows and they fine-tune their business models to sharpen their advantage). But between those two well-known stages is the crucial extrapolation stage. During it, a company both explores and exploits. And most significantly, it works to ensure that each new customer brings in additional revenue while incurring only marginal cost—the secret to lasting, profitable growth. Continued here

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An Asteroid Just Passed Very Close to Earth The truck-sized space rock came within 2,200 miles of our planet, closer than some satellites A small asteroid about the size of a truck passed within 2,200 miles of Earth on Thursday. At 7:27 p.m. Eastern time, it sped over the southern tip of South America in “one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded,” Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says in a statement. Continued here

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Crispr Wants to Feed the World Ten years after its discovery, the implications of Crispr genome editing are profound and far-reaching, and we are only getting started. This tool, adapted from a bacterial immune system, allows us to cut and edit the genetic code in any living cell to make highly targeted changes and repairs. A small number of people with genetic diseases have been helped by Crispr therapies, highlighting the potential to impact the lives of those suffering from the approximately 7,000 genetic diseases with known causes. Trials are ongoing in diseases ranging from diabetes to infectious disease. This story is from the WIRED World in 2023, our annual trends briefing. Read more stories from the series here—or download or order a copy of the magazine. Continued here

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The Strategic Secret of Private Equity The huge sums that private equity firms make on their investments evoke admiration and envy. Typically, these returns are attributed to the firms’ aggressive use of debt, concentration on cash flow and margins, freedom from public company regulations, and hefty incentives for operating managers. But the fundamental reason for private equity’s success is the strategy of buying to sell—one rarely employed by public companies, which, in pursuit of synergies, usually buy to keep. Continued here

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Scientists Tried to Break Cuddling. Instead, They Broke 30 Years of Research. Oxytocin, often lauded as the “hug hormone,” might not be necessary to induce affection. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.       Continued here

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How Venture Capital Works The popular mythology surrounding the U.S. venture-capital industry derives from a previous era. Venture capitalists who nurtured the computer industry in its infancy were legendary both for their risk-taking and for their hands-on operating experience. But today things are different, and separating the myths from the realities is crucial to understanding this important piece of the U.S. economy. Continued here

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Waiting Until You Can Create the Perfect Plan? 18 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Said You Can Only Connect the Dots Looking Backwards Fox Sports reporter and 'NASCAR Race Hub' co-host Josh Sims is a prime example. Continued here

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The Incoherence of Facebook’s Trump Decision Meta is going to allow the ex-president to spread his Big Lie about the 2020 election—behavior that got him banned in the first place. Whatever one thinks of Meta’s decision to allow Donald Trump back on Facebook and Instagram, how the company is doing so is already shambolic. This is a man who tried to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election and who incited a violent attack against Congress, efforts which Meta apparently found sufficiently dangerous to take the drastic action of banning him, then the president of the United States, from its platforms. But now Meta is lifting the ban, and as a Meta spokesperson told CNN’s Oliver Darcy, the company will permit Trump to attack the legitimacy of the 2020 election without repercussions. Continued here

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Gene Wolfe Was Sci-Fi's Most Enigmatic Writer Visit WIRED Photo for our unfiltered take on photography, photographers, and photographic journalism wrd.cm/1IEnjUH Slide: 1 / of 1.Caption: Beth Gwinn/Getty Images Continued here

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The art of asking the right questions Many people, myself included, can find asking questions to be daunting. It fills us with worry and self-doubt, as though the act of being inquisitive is an all-too-public admission of our ignorance. Unfortunately, this can also lead us to find solace in answers — no matter how shaky our understanding of the facts may be — rather than risk looking stupid in front of others or even to ourselves. But once upon a time, we were all questing-asking savants. We started grilling our parents as toddlers, and by preschool, our epistemic inquiries plumbed the depths of science, philosophy, and the social order. Where does the sun go at night? How come zippers stay zipped? Why doesn’t that man have a home like we do? Why do rocks sink but ice floats? Is the blue you see the same blue I see?  Continued here

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What Do You Like About Your Job? Leaving your job because you’re dissatisfied with the work you’re doing seems reasonable, but if you haven’t given thought to what would actually make you happy, you might end up in the same dissatisfying situation. It’s worth spending some time figuring out what you actually like about your job before making any moves. Take some time to figure out which parts of your job are the ones that bring you the most joy. That way, as you think about your future, you can best strategize about new positions you might want to aim for. To help you along the way, here are three questions that will provide you with valuable insight into the best parts of your work life. Continued here

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‘We Used to Be Called Moderate. We Are Not Moderate.’ The GOP’s self-proclaimed “pragmatists” could soon have the most power in Congress—if they choose to use it. Early this summer, the federal government will, in all likelihood, exhaust the “extraordinary measures” it is now employing to keep paying the nation’s bills. As the country careens toward that fiscal abyss, Congress will face a now-familiar stalemate: Republicans will refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats agree to cut spending. Democrats will balk. Markets will slide—perhaps precipitously—and the economy will swiftly turn south. Continued here

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'Menswear Guy' Marks a Shift in Twitter's Main Characters Menswear guy. The lingerie addict. The weird, NSFW woman who has a fascination with wolves. Depending on your interests—and often not even that—you have likely encountered one or more of these people during your sojourns on Twitter in the past few weeks. It’s part of the platform’s effort to shift users away from a simple feed of people they follow and toward a more curated experience. Twitter’s algorithm-based “For You” timeline became the default choice for users on January 10, part of Elon Musk’s plan to overhaul the platform. The company says the For You feed serves users tweets from accounts and topics they follow, augmented by “recommended tweets” and “suggested content powered by a variety of signals.” Continued here

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How Jazz Can Unlock Your Team’s Next Breakthrough “Generative conversations,” in which multiple perspectives are integrated to kindle new solutions, are a powerful way to address the complex challenges facing organizations. Experts from Wharton and SEB explain the neuroscience behind why they work. As a society, and as organizations, we are struggling with complex challenges with no easy solutions. So called “generative conversations,” in which multiple perspectives are integrated to kindle new solutions, are a powerful way to address these challenges. The Swedish bank SEB reported breakthroughs and new opportunities after implementing structured generative conversations to make progress on complex business problems. In this article, Wharton scientists Vera Ludwig and Elizabeth Johnson, Wharton professor Michael Platt, and SEB’s Per Hugander describe neuroscientific insights that may explain how generative conversations enhance creative idea generation and lead to novel, impactful solutions. They also explain how Hugander introduced a surprising element — jazz — to facilitate these conversations.   Continued here

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When Your Feelings Conflict with Your Leadership Role While the emotional work you do as a leader may go unrecognized and undervalued, it is more vital than ever in today’s work world. This labor is often a selfless and prosocial act, allowing you to care for and positively impact others even when you’re not feeling it. However, it should not come at your personal expense. In this piece, the author offers four techniques to try the next time your feelings and emotional expectations are discordant, so that you can preserve your health and ensure your high performance over time. Continued here

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How an ancient Greek myth still shapes our minds When I was five years old, my grandmother gave my younger sister and me a picture book which outlined in detail how a man and a woman have sex to create a baby. We were enthralled. Until this point, our only reference point for where babies came from was Disney's Dumbo being delivered to his mother by a stork. Continued here

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Harnessing Curiosity: Our Favorite Reads Looking back, I realize I just got impatient. I began to value the answers more than the questions. All the encyclopedias and answers to Tell Me Why collected dust in my childhood home until years later, when my own kid was born and my thirst for knowledge was renewed. When I was looking for “quick ways to calm a baby,” I was also trying to understand why my baby was crying in the first place. When my pediatrician asked me to avoid sugar until he turned one, I grew curious about the effects sugar has on our bodies. Continued here

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How the Department of Justice Lawsuit Against Google Could Harm Small Businesses Don't give the DOJ more evidence that Google is crimping online ad competition. Continued here

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Jing Corpuz: 5 values for repairing the harms of colonialism Indigenous wisdom can help solve the planetary crises that colonialism started, says lawyer Jennifer "Jing" Corpuz. Her ancestors, the Kankanaey-Igorot people of the Philippines, are known for creating the Banaue Rice Terraces: centuries-old irrigated mountain terraces that illustrate the magic of humanity living in harmony with nature. Corpuz shares five values that have guided her people as they successfully fought against development aggression and invites everyone to pursue a more just, sustainable world. Continued here

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The Founder's Dilemma The author’s studies indicate that a founder who gives up more equity to attract cofounders, new hires, and investors builds a more valuable company than one who parts with less equity. More often than not, however, those superior returns come from replacing the founder with a professional CEO more experienced with the needs of a growing company. This fundamental tension requires founders to make “rich” versus “king” trade-offs to maximize either their wealth or their control over the company. Continued here

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Even When Ticketmaster Works, It Doesn’t There was a time, not so long ago, when you actually had to show up at a concert to get ripped off. Scalping, the process of buying tickets for cheap and reselling them to desperate fans, usually on the day of a show, used to be limited to crowded stadium entranceways and sidewalk waiting areas. These days it all happens on Ticketmaster. As fans of Taylor Swift know best, America’s leading online ticket peddler is a mess: Late last year, the site buckled under the pressure of presale demand for the megastar’s Eras Tour. When a bot attack overwhelmed the site, many fans were left in the lurch, forced to turn to secondary markets with markups in the tens of thousands of dollars. In a congressional hearing this week sparked largely by that fiasco, just about everyone ganged up on Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment. “I want to congratulate and thank you for an absolutely stunning achievement,” Senator Richard Blumenthal told Live Nation’s president and CFO, Joe Berchtold. “You have brought together Republicans and Democrats in an absolutely unified cause.” Continued here

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What Kids Learn From Hard Conversations Talking with children about painful topics can be complicated—but it can help shape their worldview for life. Having a normal conversation with a kid can be challenging enough, but talking with them about sensitive topics can be even more complicated. Many immigrant parents, for example, find explaining the decision to leave one country for another painful, although necessary. The author Achut Deng recently told my colleague Caitlin Dickerson how hard it was to share with her sons what she had gone through while emigrating from Sudan to the U.S. as a refugee, including her near-death experiences: She wasn’t sure that her boys were ready to hear her story, but she also understood that they had to learn it. Some stories, though, have no comforting resolution. Cynthia Dewi Oka considers motherhood and the burden of crossing borders in her poem “For the child(ren) I cannot carry,” but comes to no easy conclusions. Continued here

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Alphabet's Layoffs Aren't Very Googley In 2004, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin engaged in a comically passive-aggressive IPO road show. They eschewed business suits for casual garb, refused to answer many questions from finance bigwigs, and warned investors that instead of focusing on profits, the newly public company might apply its resources "to ameliorate a number of the world's problems." Both founders dreaded the restrictions of a public company and vowed that Google would never sing to Wall Street's tune. To ensure they could do this, the founders structured the company so that they controlled the majority of voting shares. Instead of kicking back money to shareholders, Google would pamper the talent that drove its innovations, providing perks like in-house massages, free food, and lavish compensation. For instance, at the end of 2010, Page and Brin blew their workers' minds by announcing an across-the-board 10 percent raise, a doubling of the generous annual bonus, and a $1,000 Christmas present, just for the hell of it. The beneficiaries already had top-of-market salaries augmented by lucrative equity shares. But the founders' largesse made clear that they meant it when they said employees were the heart of the company. Brin and Page haven't been deeply involved for years, but in the company's 25-year history, a lot of that convention-defying legacy has remained. At least until this month, when Google's parent company Alphabet laid off 12,000 employees, about 6 percent of its workforce, including many senior leaders and some people who had worked there since its early days. For a company renowned for coddling its workers, the layoffs were a psychic shock. Especially since some of the victims were dispatched coldly, with their email access cut off before they could even say goodbye to long-term colleagues. Continued here

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Everything You Need to Know About New Data Privacy Laws New state privacy laws will impact how small businesses collect user data and market to their customers. Continued here

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Yes, You Have to Be Smart to Play Jeopardy This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. A recent Jeopardy contestant lit into the show, claiming that it isn’t really all that good a measure of a player’s intelligence. He’s got a point—but not the one he thinks he’s making. Continued here

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The Logic Behind Biden’s Refusal to Negotiate the Debt Ceiling President Joe Biden has already made the most important domestic-policy decision he’ll likely face this year. Biden and his top advisers have repeatedly indicated that they will reject demands from the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives to link increasing the debt ceiling with cutting federal spending. Instead, Biden is insisting that Congress pass a clean debt-ceiling increase, with no conditions attached. Biden’s refusal to negotiate with Republicans now is rooted in the Obama administration’s experiences in 2011–15 of trying to navigate increases in the debt ceiling through the same political configuration present today: a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. While Biden says he won’t negotiate a budget deal tied to a debt-ceiling increase, then-President Obama did just that in 2011. Those negotiations not only failed but proved so disruptive to financial markets, and so personally scarring, that Obama and his team emerged from the ordeal determined never to repeat it. And when House Republicans came back in 2013 asking for more concessions in exchange for raising the debt ceiling again, Obama declined to negotiate with them; eventually the GOP raised the debt ceiling without conditions. Continued here

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Make the Most of Your New Hourly Role A 2020 report from the Brookings Institution shows that people between the ages of 16 and 29 years old represent less than one-fourth of the workforce, yet account for one-third of the rise in the unemployment rate during the first quarter of this year — meaning young people were more likely to be laid off than older workers in almost every industry. Continued here

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Tanks for Ukraine Have Shifted the Balance of Power in Europe When the German and U.S. governments finally agreed this week to supply some of their most formidable battle tanks to Ukraine, the balance of power within Europe perceptibly shifted. For months, President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, fearing an escalation of conflict between the West and Russia, had stubbornly put off Ukrainian requests for the powerful, highly maneuverable vehicles, and the European states most directly vulnerable to Russian aggression—in Scandinavia, the Baltic region, and Central and Eastern Europe—had grown more and more frustrated with Washington and Berlin. Finally, the smaller countries had had enough. In an impressive show of diplomatic muscle, they forced NATO’s two greatest powers to take a step that Biden and especially Scholz have clearly been afraid of taking. The episode is a reminder that a security alliance isn’t just a means for major powers, such as the U.S. or Germany, to amplify their own influence by drawing on the forces of smaller nations. In this case, some of NATO’s smaller members and partners understand the Russian threat far more clearly than the U.S. or Germany does, because they don’t have the option of complacency. Continued here

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Photos of the Week: Firefly Forest, Husky Club, Turnip Toss Frustration at the Australian Open, a light show in London, Republic Day parade rehearsals in India, a rugby match in New Zealand, snow cover in Yosemite Valley, alpine skiing in Austria, anti-government protests in Peru, a snowy football game in New York, and much more A model walks the runway during the Viktor & Rolf Haute Couture Spring/Summer 2023 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on January 25, 2023, in Paris, France. # Continued here

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Stop. Does That Message Really Need to Be an Email? As a business tool, email is both essential and incredibly annoying. While we can’t do without it, many of us aren’t using it in the right way, and even more of us are sending way more emails than we should, leading to unnecessary distractions that cost us around 27 minutes of productive time. Continued here

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What to Read When You’re Expecting These writers go beyond the realm of standard guidebooks to offer generous insight and reassurance. The moment I learned I was pregnant, advice began pouring in from all directions. Much was unsolicited and came from well-meaning friends, relatives, or strangers in the endless flow of comments on internet forums. Meanwhile, guidebooks and articles filled my head with warnings. Following in the footsteps of millions of people before me, I dutifully purchased a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting and jotted down notes on the perils of cold cuts and various medications. Continued here

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The 10 Best Amazon Prime Films Right Now Over the past year or so, Netflix and Apple TV+ have been the ones duking it out to have the most prestigious film offerings (congrats, CODA!), but that doesn’t mean other streaming services don’t have excellent offerings. Like, for example, Amazon Prime. The streamer was one of the first to go around picking up film festival darlings and other lovable favorites, and they’re all still there in the library, so if they flew under your radar the first time, now is the perfect time to catch up. Our picks for the 10 best films on Amazon Prime are below. Also, before you ask, all the films in our guide are included in your Prime subscription—no renting here. Once you’ve watched your fill, check out our lists for the best films on Netflix and best movies on Disney+ if you’re looking for something else to watch. We also have a guide to the best shows on Amazon, too, if that's what you're in the mood for.  Continued here

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Giving and Receiving Feedback: Our Favorite Reads Learn what to take, and what to leave behind. Continued here

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The Weight-Loss-Drug Revolution Is a Miracle—And a Menace This is Work in Progress, a newsletter by Derek Thompson about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here to get it every week. About a decade ago, Susan Yanovski, an obesity researcher at the National Institutes of Health, held a symposium to discuss a question that bedeviled her field: Why was it so hard to develop weight-loss drugs that actually worked and didn’t harm the people they were meant to help? Continued here

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Ask Ethan: Do my atoms really "touch" each other? One of the most counterintuitive things about existence is the notion of forces. In order to experience a force — that is, to feel the influence of something else on us — two objects don’t necessarily even need to touch, or be in contact, with one another. Objects on Earth’s surface feel Earth’s gravity, but so do airplanes, satellites, and even the Moon. An electrically charged object attracts and repels other electrical charges, regardless of how far away they are from each other. And, in a more familiar fashion, two magnets flipped so that their north poles face each other mutually repel one another so strongly that even the strongest humans cannot bring them completely together. So what happens, then, when you try to bring your thumb and forefinger together? How close do they actually get, and do they ever truly “touch” one another? That’s what Peter Mead wants to know, writing in to ask: Continued here

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The violence of the Tonga eruption is a wake-up call to watch other submarine volcanoes The Kingdom of Tonga exploded into global news on January 15 last year with one of the most spectacular and violent volcanic eruptions ever seen.  Remarkably, it was caused by a volcano that lies under hundreds of metres of seawater. The event shocked the public and volcano scientists alike.  Continued here

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NASA’s Electric Plane Will Take Flight This Year—but Its Future Is Uncertain The X-57 Maxwell has removed some barriers to electric flight, but its funding expires soon After navigating challenges—from exploding transistors to a full redesign of its battery packs—NASA's all-electric airplane will take its first test flight this year. Continued here

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How circular economics can make us happier and less stressed Excerpted from Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff. Copyright © 2022 by Douglas Rushkoff. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Once, while addressing a conference of German bankers and policymakers, I told the story of how a steelworkers union applied the principles of “bounded economics” to their own retirement funds. Instead of investing them in the stock market, they began investing in construction projects that hired union steelworkers. They created jobs for themselves with their assets, which also generated returns. This worked so well that they took things a step further and invested in senior housing projects for retiring steelworkers and their parents —​ essentially getting three forms of return on the same investment. Continued here

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‘Infinity Pool’ Isn’t Just Another Satire of the Ultra-Wealthy One of pop culture’s favorite locales of late is a secluded resort for the rich and irresponsible, a landscape defined by both gorgeous vistas and cutting satire. Think The White Lotus, Glass Onion, the culinary getaway of The Menu, or the doomed luxury yacht of Triangle of Sadness. It’s the perfect setting for a story to deride opulent foolishness, give some wealthy villains their comeuppance, and critique the churning, ever-widening gyre between the haves and have-nots. But all of the aforementioned works, no matter how bluntly parodic, have one foot in reality, whereas Brandon Cronenberg’s new sci-fi horror, Infinity Pool, takes that familiar domain and saturates it with wild, lurid futurism. In his nascent filmmaking career, Cronenberg (son of the gnarly Canadian master David) has concentrated on unsettling interactions between technology and the human body. His 2020 breakthrough, Possessor, imagined a world where people could be taken over and puppeteered from afar, a process that was both spiritually disturbing and physically damaging. Infinity Pool offers an equally disquieting invention: human cloning, via a pool of red goo, used expressly for punishment. Continued here

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Why you should laugh at yourself, according to Seneca and Nietzsche We feel the nagging power of fate each day of our lives. Our umbrella is plucked before rain, an elevator door is shut in our face, we get stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, our flight is canceled. It’s human nature to feel upset and try to fight these things.  To the Stoic philosophers, however, being consumed by negative reactions doesn’t help you fix your problems or find peace. Sure, much of what happens in life is outside of our control. But we do control how we respond to the inconveniences and tragedies that fate tosses our way.  Continued here

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Pivot to ChatGPT? BuzzFeed preps for AI-written content while CNET fumbles On Thursday, an internal memo obtained by The Wall Street Journal revealed that BuzzFeed is planning to use ChatGPT-style text synthesis technology from OpenAI to create individualized quizzes and potentially other content in the future. After the news hit, BuzzFeed's stock rose 200 percent. On Friday, BuzzFeed formally announced the move in a post on its site. Continued here

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Annual? Bivalent? For all? Future of COVID shots murky after FDA deliberations The US Food and Drug Administration's committee of independent vaccine experts gathered Thursday to discuss the future of COVID-19 shots. The meeting seemed primed for explosive debate. Earlier in the week, the FDA released documents that made clear the agency is holding steadfast to its idea that COVID vaccines will fit the mold of annual flu shots—with reformulations decided in the first half of each year, followed by fall rollouts in anticipation of winter waves. Continued here

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Bird study links spatial thinking with not getting eaten It's pretty easy to link humans' intelligence to our success as a species. Things like agriculture, building cities, and surviving in harsh environments require a large collection of mental skills, from good memory to the ability to communicate and work together. But it's often less clear what role intelligence plays in species with less obvious mental capabilities. In many cases, it's hard to even measure mental capacities; in other cases, it's hard to guess which capacities might improve survival. Continued here

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How to fix GoldenEye 007's control issues on the Nintendo Switch [Updated] Update (5:35 pm ET): As user Cuesport77 points out on Reddit, Nintendo offers a system-level button remapping function that can get around most of the issues highlighted in this piece. Going into the Switch's system settings and swapping the left and right analog stick inputs (as well as the inputs for any other buttons you want) can help provide more standardized "dual stick" controls for the game. Continued here

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Daily caffeine intake temporarily alters your brain structure Caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world, consumed by billions of people every day in the form of tea, coffee, and energy drinks. It is commonly consumed to boost alertness and focus.  On the flip side, coffee is widely believed to interfere with sleep, and sleep deprivation is known to reduce brain volume and impair cognitive function. Is it possible that caffeine consumption somehow changes the structure of your brain? Continued here

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This mutant Venus flytrap mysteriously lost its ability to "count" to 5 In 2011, a horticulturist named Mathias Maier stumbled across an unusual mutant of a Venus flytrap, a carnivorous plant that traps and feeds on insects. Scientists recently discovered that the typical Venus flytrap can actually "count" to five, sparking further research on how the plant manages this remarkable feat. The mutant flytrap might hold the key. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, this mutant flytrap doesn't snap closed in response to stimulation like typical Venus flytraps. Continued here

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Like shoppers, Apple shows reduced interest in buying phones As spotted by MacRumors on Wednesday, Apple has cut the trade-in values of iPhones by up to $80, with the biggest cuts coming to the iPhone 13 Pro Max ($570 trade-in value versus $650 before) and the iPhone 13 Pro ($470 versus $550). Continued here

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GoldenEye can't distract from Switch retro games' most annoying pitfall Today marks the long-awaited rerelease of the Nintendo 64 classic GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo Switch. As was announced before the launch, the game supports widescreen. When I learned that, my first thought wasn't "Oh, nice!" Rather, it was "OK, but what about the rest of the library?" Continued here

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#GermanyRIP. Kremlin-loyal hacktivists wage DDoSes to retaliate for tank aid Threat actors loyal to the Kremlin have stepped up attacks in support of its invasion of Ukraine, with denial-of-service attacks hitting German banks and other organizations and the unleashing of a new destructive data wiper on Ukraine. Continued here

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D&D maker retreats from attempts to update longstanding "open" license The original OGL 1.0a, first released in the early '00s, will now "remain untouched" WotC announced in a tweet Friday. What's more, the entire D&D Systems Reference Document (SRD)—which also includes creative content like classes, spells, and monsters trademarked and copyrighted by WotC—is now available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, meaning it's free to use as long as proper credit is given. Continued here

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Prenda Law lawyer loses attempt to file more piracy lawsuits from prison Paul Hansmeier, who is serving a 14-year prison sentence for filing sham copyright infringement lawsuits and extorting money from victims, has lost an attempt to enforce copyrights from prison. In a ruling Monday, a federal judge rejected Hansmeier's request to prevent the government from enforcing mail-wire fraud and money laundering laws against him. Hansmeier wanted an injunction so that he could file copyright lawsuits without facing new charges. Continued here